The first time I met Bob Novak, I was eight years old. I remember what I was wearing – a sleeveless tomato-soup-red wool knit jumpsuit with swingy wide legs and a brown turtleneck beneath (my most soigné and mature-looking outfit at the time) – and that I sat in it, cross-legged on the trunk of my mother’s car, waiting patiently for him to come up the driveway with my father. All I knew then was that he was a famous journalist, part of a team (with Rowland Evans) that produced a column called Inside Report, which I had seen in our newspaper. (We were a town of 47,000 – that’s how far the column’s reach extended.) Even then I had some vague notion that I wanted to be a reporter myself, and anyway, I was always dying to meet someone from the wider world. So I sat and I waited.

When they finally arrived, Novak got out of the car and flashed me the enormous grin that is all the more disarming because it so unexpectedly and so completely lights up the otherwise brooding face of the Prince of Darkness. (He earned the title early on because of his once-dark hair, olive skin and seemingly pessimistic outlook, but he never minded it and used it as the title of his memoir.) He seemed amused that such a young fan had actually kept a vigil in anticipation of his arrival, and we became great buddies from that moment until Monday. 

It was 1968, Nixon had either just been elected or was about to be. My father was a Southern Republican pioneer in those days, and under his leadership the Mississippi delegation played a role in securing Nixon’s nomination. It was a pragmatic choice – if we helped Nixon, he might help us. In those days Mississippi, like the rest of the Solid South, was in the hands of the bad, old, racist Democrats, and so politically isolated that the last sitting president to visit the state had been Teddy Roosevelt, who had come to hunt, and who famously did not shoot a bear on his trip. Evans and Novak wanted to be in at the beginning of what would become a profound political shift, and they each made many more trips. But it was that first meeting I remember so clearly. And after it, I can’t recall a time when Novak and his family weren’t in our lives.

Much of my life with Novak reads like a dining guide to establishment Washington through the ages. The first time I went to Washington with my father alone, at the age of ten I think, Novak took us to the Sans Souci, the restaurant practically across the street from the White House (before Libya and terrorists and those awful permanent barricades were put up to block off Pennsylvania Avenue), where every powerful person in D.C. ate lunch. (There were far fewer lobbyists then and the powerful people had real power – and they also drank a lot more martinis.) A couple of summers later my father let me take my best friend along with me, and Novak took the three of us to dinner at the brand new Tiberio, where I discovered the pleasures of Northern Italian food – and more than one glass of white wine. If Novak thought it was strange that his dining companions included two adolescent girls, he never showed it. I only ever remember him treating me one way – as an equal.